Cohesity Raises $250 Million in Funding Round Led by SoftBank Vision Fund

June 11, 2018

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 11, 2018--Cohesity, the leader of hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced it raised $250 million in an oversubscribed Series D funding round led by the SoftBank Vision Fund with strong participation from strategic investors Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, along with early investor Sequoia Capital and others. The investment is a testament to Cohesity’s leadership in transforming data center and cloud operations with web-scale simplicity for secondary data. This round brings total equity raised to $410 million, outpacing all other Series D enterprise software investments in the United States over the last 18 months. This is only the second time SoftBank Investment Advisers has invested in an enterprise software company. Cohesity is using the investment to power large-scale global expansion by attacking a problem that enterprises currently spend an estimated $60 billion each year to address using separate point solutions.

“Cohesity pioneered hyperconverged secondary storage as a first stepping stone on the path to a much larger transformation of enterprise infrastructure spanning public and private clouds,” said Deep Nishar, senior managing partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers. “We believe that Cohesity’s web-scale Google-like approach, cloud-native architecture, and incredible simplicity is changing the business of IT in a fundamental way.”

“My vision has always been to provide enterprises with cloud-like simplicity for their many fragmented applications and data – backup, test and development, analytics, and more,” said Cohesity CEO and Founder Mohit Aron. “Cohesity has built significant momentum and market share during the last 12 months and we are just getting started. We succeed because our customers are some of the world’s brightest and most fanatical IT organizations and are an extension of our development efforts.”

By simplifying application and data management while dramatically improving efficiency, Cohesity has delivered enormous value to customers. Cohesity DataPlatform addresses the fragmented and complex infrastructure that enterprises are currently attacking with massive resources that could be driving success in other parts of the business.

“We believe Cohesity’s hyperconverged architecture promises to fundamentally change the secondary storage landscape. We are excited to help fuel the company’s momentum in providing enterprise customers with seamless application and data movement across the cloud and corporate data center,” said Pete Chung, managing principal and head of Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. “Cohesity represents that elusive combination of rapid growth, meaningful scale, and market momentum we look for as later-stage investors.”

Cohesity will also benefit from the renewed support of strategic investors Cisco and HPE, both innovative technology leaders serving the Forbes Global 2000. HPE offers a suite of comprehensive solutions built with Cohesity’s platform. Their decision to double down on prior strategic investments in Cohesity will give the company an even greater foothold to grow its presence among enterprise customers throughout the world.

“HPE’s expanding relationship with Cohesity stems from our commitment to deliver the best technology solutions to solve our customers’ crucial business challenges, whether through organic development or partnership,” said Vishal Lall, chief strategy officer, HPE. “We continue to collaborate closely to integrate Cohesity’s market-leading hyperconverged secondary storage platform with our cutting-edge data center solutions to provide an integrated, tested, and validated offer to customers. We are proud to invest and partner with Cohesity through our Hewlett Packard Pathfinder program.”

“Cisco has a long history of innovation in modernizing the data center and we are excited to increase our investment in Cohesity,” said Rob Salvagno, vice president, Corporate Development at Cisco. “Cohesity has quickly managed to scale in the secondary data and applications market by delivering a software fabric that combines the simplicity, scalability, and cost efficiency modern enterprises are looking for.”

“We first met Mohit when he was envisioning how to bring modern system design to the secondary storage market, which led to the founding of Cohesity,” said Dr. Bill Coughran, partner at Sequoia Capital. “We’ve been thrilled with Cohesity’s tremendous growth since its Series A and are excited by its accelerating progress.”

Comments from Participating Investors:

“In the same way that Mohit Aron transformed the primary storage environment as founder of Nutanix, Cohesity’s explosive growth is proving once again that his world class team is well on its way to creating another category-defining company,” said Stuart Peterson, senior partner, ARTIS Ventures.

“We backed Mohit at his previous firm, Nutanix, and are proud to support him again at Cohesity. The company has a smart and timely vision for radically simplifying secondary data for large customers, which is part of a broader move by enterprises toward hybrid-cloud infrastructure. We believe Cohesity is armed with the right team and product to attack this large and growing market,” said Neeraj Agrawal, general partner, Battery Ventures.

“I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Cohesity’s founder and CEO Mohit Aron for nearly a decade, working with him closely as an investor for the last three years. A brilliant engineer, architect, and leader, Mohit is uniquely positioned to lead the enterprise IT transformation for secondary data. Cohesity’s customer enthusiasm and market traction are a testament to the team’s deep technical expertise, unique product vision, and implicit understanding of enterprise infrastructure and the cloud,” said Karan Mehandru, general partner, Trinity Ventures.

“Cohesity’s latest investment round is validation of the value their unique hyperconverged secondary data platform provides and their ability to adapt to industry trends towards hybrid cloud infrastructure. Their approach to simplifying the process for secondary data management and workloads at web scale is truly ground-breaking and we look forward to continuing to support them on their journey,” said Quinn Li, VP and global head of Qualcomm Ventures.

“Companies can unlock enormous value by consolidating and simplifying the enterprise data center. Cohesity has designed the perfect platform to address this crucial opportunity in the face of organizations’ multiplying volume and types of data generated across different non-primary systems. We’re proud to have supported Cohesity’s vision from the beginning, and we’re excited to now see this new approach to secondary data take hold across the globe,” said Gaurav Garg, founding partner, Wing Venture Capital.

Cohesity makes your data work for you by consolidating secondary storage silos onto a hyperconverged, web-scale data platform that spans both private and public clouds. Enterprise customers begin by radically streamlining their backup and data protection, then converge file and object services, test/dev instances, and analytic functions to provide a global data store. Cohesity counts many Global 1000 companies and federal agencies among its rapidly growing customer base and was named to Forbes’ “Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2017,” LinkedIn’s “Startups: The 50 Industry Disruptors You Need to Know Now,” and CRN’s “2017 Emerging Vendors in Storage” lists. For more information, visit our website www.cohesity.com and blog https://cohesity.com/blog/, follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/cohesity and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/3750699/ and like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/cohesity/.